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- Title
Frederick Douglass's Revolutionary Publicness.
- Authors
Carr, Ryan
- Abstract
Recent scholarship on Frederick Douglass has emphasized the extent to which he understood public culture in juridical terms, as a form of pleading before the court of public opinion. This essay calls into question the sufficiency of this juridical model of publicness for estimating Douglass's literary-historical significance. Although Douglass never fully abandoned the rhetoric of the court of public opinion, he departed from his abolitionist colleagues in developing, alongside that older rhetoric, a more person-centered style of publicness that sought to compel readers to acknowledge Douglass's individual agency. This more expressive mode of publicness, which Douglass began refining as a speech-maker, would by the 1890s transform his understanding of print culture.
- Subjects
REVOLUTIONS; DOUGLASS, Frederick, 1818-1895; SPEECHWRITING; PUBLIC opinion; SPEECHWRITERS; PRINT culture; RHETORIC
- Publication
ELH, 2020, Vol 87, Issue 3, p761
- ISSN
0013-8304
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/elh.2020.0027